Saturday, December 27, 2014

— “In an article on the
organization of leisure, Harold Wilensky traces what he calls ‘the compensatory
leisure hypothesis’ and ‘the spillover leisure hypothesis’ back to Engels’ work
The Conditions of the Working-Class in
England in 1844.* The first states that the worker who is alienated at work
compensates by active and energetic leisure activities; the second that ‘he
develops a spillover leisure routine in which alienation from work becomes
alienation from life; the mental stultification produced by his labour
permeates his leisure.’ …[W]e may ask whether a conjunction of the two
mechanisms might not offer a more satisfactory account than either of them
taken separately.”—Jon Elster (Indeed!)

* The article (which one can
find online): H. Wilensky, “Work, Careers, and Social Integration,” International Social Science Journal 12
(1960): 543-560.

— Among the individuals I’ve
come to rely on for an understanding of “Liberalism” generally (as a political
philosophy that provided essential philosophical premises for contemporary
democratic theory and praxis) are Stephen Holmes, Ian Shapiro, Gerald
Gaus...and Alan Ryan. Today I picked up the latter’s new book, which I look
forward to with relish: Alan Ryan, The Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton University Press, 2014). Incidentally,
I've read a few wholesale critiques of Liberalism from both the Right and Left
that fail to appreciate the progressive, emancipatory dimensions of this
political philosophy, not a small part of which should be integral to any
meaningful articulation of democratic socialism.

— Inspired by and in debt to Jon
Elster, I rely on several proverbs in the following:

Conservatives assume capitalism
provides even the poor with ample opportunity along the lines of the proverb,
“necessity is the mother of invention,” yet this is best viewed in the light of
the notion that one might (should?) pull oneself up by one’s own bootstraps,
which refers to what is literally an impossible task. With regard to workers
and capitalists, as Jon Elster explains, “the freedom to move into the
capitalist class…can only be realized by the worker who is [to quote Marx] an
‘exceedingly clever and shrewd fellow.’ Any worker ‘can’ do it, in the sense of
having the formal freedom to do so, but only a few are really able to,” hence
it’s the case that, in the words of Marx, “every workman, if he is an
exceedingly clever fellow…can possibly be converted into an exploiteur du travail d’autrui.” Exits
from the working class (or poverty) may exist, but for sundry reasons, they do
not take the form of a generalizable opportunity for most workers, most of the
time. So the more applicable proverb (Norwegian in origin) in the case of both
the poor and the working class states, “it is expensive to be poor.” In other
words, even if one is motivated to “innovate,” or to become a member of the
capitalist class (or, say, a member of the petite bourgeoisie) the desire is
not matched by the requisite opportunity, for one is deprived of the necessary
“resources:” one’s formal freedom is paired with absence of capacity to realize
same. Exits from the state of poverty or (more likely) the working class
“exist,” but there are sundry reasons (e.g., one lacks the time and money to
discover them or, even if one finds them, the cost or risk is inordinate) most
workers will never be able to take advantage of them.

This
bears directly upon the theory of revolution as well for, as Elster
reminds us, “Revolutions are rarely caused by extreme hardship, because
people living at subsistence conditions have to spend all their time
simply staying alive. They may have the desire for change, but no
opportunity to effect it. Conversely, the well-off may have the
opportunities but not the desire. In between, there may be a range of
incomes that have a positive net effect—mediated by desires and
opportunities—on the propensity to engage in revolutionary behavior.” In
a future post, again prompted by Elster, I hope to discuss one
compelling theory of revolution that more or less stems from what Elster
terms the “Tocqueville effect” in which an increase in opportunities
finds aspiration levels increasing even faster, generating more
discontent with the status quo (we also learn this account is a bit more
complicated than appears, as one might tell ‘different fine-grained
stories’ to explain this dynamic that need not result in revolutionary
discontent, hence ‘if A, then sometimes C, D, and B,’ with only one of
these being revolutionary behavior). - See more at:
http://www.religiousleftlaw.com/2014/12/sundry-stuff-.html#sthash.fvUtAxBJ.dpuf

This
bears directly upon the theory of revolution as well for, as Elster
reminds us, “Revolutions are rarely caused by extreme hardship, because
people living at subsistence conditions have to spend all their time
simply staying alive. They may have the desire for change, but no
opportunity to effect it. Conversely, the well-off may have the
opportunities but not the desire. In between, there may be a range of
incomes that have a positive net effect—mediated by desires and
opportunities—on the propensity to engage in revolutionary behavior.” In
a future post, again prompted by Elster, I hope to discuss one
compelling theory of revolution that more or less stems from what Elster
terms the “Tocqueville effect” in which an increase in opportunities
finds aspiration levels increasing even faster, generating more
discontent with the status quo (we also learn this account is a bit more
complicated than appears, as one might tell ‘different fine-grained
stories’ to explain this dynamic that need not result in revolutionary
discontent, hence ‘if A, then sometimes C, D, and B,’ with only one of
these being revolutionary behavior). - See more at:
http://www.religiousleftlaw.com/2014/12/sundry-stuff-.html#sthash.fvUtAxBJ.dpuf

This
bears directly upon the theory of revolution as well for, as Elster
reminds us, “Revolutions are rarely caused by extreme hardship, because
people living at subsistence conditions have to spend all their time
simply staying alive. They may have the desire for change, but no
opportunity to effect it. Conversely, the well-off may have the
opportunities but not the desire. In between, there may be a range of
incomes that have a positive net effect—mediated by desires and
opportunities—on the propensity to engage in revolutionary behavior.” In
a future post, again prompted by Elster, I hope to discuss one
compelling theory of revolution that more or less stems from what Elster
terms the “Tocqueville effect” in which an increase in opportunities
finds aspiration levels increasing even faster, generating more
discontent with the status quo (we also learn this account is a bit more
complicated than appears, as one might tell ‘different fine-grained
stories’ to explain this dynamic that need not result in revolutionary
discontent, hence ‘if A, then sometimes C, D, and B,’ with only one of
these being revolutionary behavior). - See more at:
http://www.religiousleftlaw.com/2014/12/sundry-stuff-.html#sthash.fvUtAxBJ.dpu— I’ve updated my bibliography
on emotions, found here.— Another delightful essay by Pico Iyer. (In the brief biographical identification of Pico it states that ‘his
latest book, The Man Within My Head,
circles around Graham Greene and hauntedness,’ although I would say it rather
circles around Graham Greene and Pico’s late father, Raghavan Iyer.)

— This is very important: Jed S.
Rakoff, “Why Innocent People Plead Guilty,”The
New York Review of Books, November 20, 2014. The subsequent exchange of
letters, particularly the most recent (Jan. 8 issue), are worth reading as
well.

Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series, Panel No. 3 (1940-41)

— Please see Kenan Malik’s post
on “Jacob Lawrence and the Great Migration” over at his blog, Pandaemonium.
Malik notes that “over the next few weeks,” he “will publish on Pandaemonium
the complete sequence of 60 panels, ten at a time, together with Lawrence’s
original captions, that are as much part of the series as are the paintings
themselves.

— Toward delineating the
contours of economic democracy as part of the struggle for socialism:

Bayat, Assaf. Work, Politics and Power: An International Perspective on Workers’
Control and Self-Management. Monthly Review Press, 1991.

Case, John and
Rosemary C. R. Taylor, eds. Co-ops,
Communes and Collectives: Experiments
in Social Change in the 1960s and 1970s. Pantheon Books, 1979.

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